Addons

Whenever Firefox gets a major update, Power Downloader gets asked the inevitable question: what do I do if my favorite extension hasn't been updated yet? This time, Power D was asked by Kitty Kilobyte's cousin's sister's best friend forever, Tessa Terabyte. In her office, Tessa said, she has to copy text from Web sites and paste them into e-mails, and she used the extension called AutoCopy to help her do that.

AutoCopy is a highly useful extension. By simply highlighting a string of text, it would copy to the clipboard, and open a small menu asking … Read more

Barely two days old, Firefox 3 has already been downloaded more than 12.3 million times at the time of writing. If you haven't downloaded it yet, you can grab it here for Windows, Mac, Linux, and a Portable Windows version.

The price of early adoption, even on a heavily-tested browser like Firefox 3, is early questions. Here are four you're likely to come across, and please add your own in the comments below. I'll do my best to answer them.

Question one: How do you kill the "awesome bar"?

Answer: A Howitzer, a crowbar, … Read more

Extensions, plug-ins, add-ons, whatever you want to call 'em, Firefox 3 has 'em. In fact, though it may seem that many of your favorites haven't yet updated, you might be in luck. By visiting the home pages of several of the plug-ins I use, I found that most of them had either a functional, stable beta or a full update ready to use with Firefox 3. This collection of add-ons I use both at home and in the office, and can be used for the Windows, Mac, and Windows Portable versions of the browser.

You wouldn't think that … Read more

Web-based email clients tend to evoke passions not dissimilar to those that govern which browser you use to check them. If Gmail is your fave, and you use Firefox to check it, Better Gmail is must-have extension.

Properly called Better Gmail 2 to distinguish itself from the previous version of the plug-in which had been designed for the older version of Gmail, Better Gmail introduces a highly useful collection of Greasemonkey scripts bundled into one convenient package.

The features come fast and furious, but should appeal to users looking for everything from skins to keyboard shortcuts. It can force an … Read more

It may seem as if the whole world is using Firefox, but surveys indicate that nearly 75 percent of Netizens still use Internet Explorer. If you're part of that 75 percent, you need to check out this First Look video for the one plug-in you absolutely must have: IE7Pro.

IE7Pro powers up Internet Explorer with many of the features and functions that were once limited to other browsers, including a session manager, prefetching, and mouse gestures.

On Monday, I described Vaita's free Outlook Duplicate Items Remover, an add-on that finds duplicate copies of Outlook messages, contacts, calendar entries, and tasks. Now, I'll continue to trim my bloated Outlook in-box by using another freebie: the Kopf Outlook Attachment Remover created by Bruno Marotta.

After you download the program and restart Outlook, you see a floating Attachment Remover toolbar that you can drag and dock at the top of the screen along with all the other toolbars to keep it from blocking your view. Click the toolbar's one-and-only button to open the program's one-and-only … Read more

These days you can't be too careful about what you download. A new Firefox add-on from Florian Queze called View Dependencies takes some of the guesswork out of knowing the content of a Web page, and the source of that content.

After you download the free add-on and restart Firefox, you'll see a Dependencies tab when you click Tools > Page Info to view information about the page that's currently open. The tab lists the files on the page, their URL, and their size. (Note that on at least one page I tested the file size was … Read more

The one must-have add-on for Internet Explorer is IE7Pro. It gives Microsoft's browser many of the features that Firefox aficionados consider essential, such as mouse gestures, ad blocking, user scripts, and other basic tweaks. Now IE7 users can add a session manager and prefetching to that list.

Using IE7Pro is a snap. The add-on installs an icon on your IE status bar at the bottom, and you right-click it to access the IE7Pro options. Think of it as a context menu for your plugins. The Settings panel is accessible from that menu or using CTRL+F7 hotkeys.

The session … Read more

I used to think the last thing I needed was another browser toolbar. But now I gladly sacrifice a little screen real estate to find out who owns the sites I visit, where they're located, and whether they pass muster with the security checkers.

That's what you get with CallingID, an add-on for Internet Explorer and Firefox that adds a multi-hued toolbar to the browsers. Along with use of green, yellow, and red to signify the site's safety, the toolbar shows the owner and location of the site.

Whenever you attempt to enter a name and password … Read more